Minding the verge: Moderating webcasts and chat

Abstract

Don W. Hamerly is the director, School Library Media Program, and assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University. You can reach him at dhamerly dom.edu O nline instruction at institutions of higher education in the United States is burgeoning in the midst of a digital social media revolution. Since 2003, yearly reports from the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) have charted the rapid uptake and increasing acceptance of online instruction by students, faculty and administrators. The Sloan-C and others report the expansion of online instruction sweepingly, in terms of administrative motivation, infrastructure investment, stakeholder acceptance, measures of success and delivery formats, occasionally via anecdotal examples of digital media applications used alone or in concert in specific educational contexts, but rarely in terms of the personal agency of instructors and students. A prevailing theme in these reports nevertheless reflects the current zeitgeist of what is alternately called the connected era, connected age or network society: increasingly accessible social and collaborative digital computing is changing the way people connect with one another and interact. New ways of connecting affect, among other things, the nature of interactions in online learning environments, but the systematic study of how instructors and students manage new ways of connecting lags behind the increased adoption of online instruction. As the number of and enrollment in online courses grow, and as the facilitators of online courses – administrators, instructors and information technology support staff – employ established and emerging social software applications and devices in online courses, opportunities continually arise to study how digital sociality is affecting online learning. When course instructors bring into a learning environment the kinds of digital social media that they and students use for socializing in their personal lives, what happens? How do students and instructors perceive the effects of digital social media on learning, and how do students and instructors manage their interactions when they use digital social media for online courses? These questions inspired a recent study of the use of combined webcasts and chat for instruction in an online course for undergraduates taught by graduate students at an iSchool.